How to Score More Points in Scramble

Scramble is a popular word game on Facebook. At any given time, thousands of Facebook users are playing live games in huge multi-player rooms, or challenging their friends to one-on-one games. As Scramble grows more popular, being able to play well is a useful skill. If nothing else, you don't want to be humiliated by your friends. Here's how to score more points in Scramble.

Things You'll Need

• Facebook account

Instructions

1. Understand how the game works. Scramble is basically an online version of Boggle. In both games, players compete to spell out the most words in a limited time, using a grid of random letters. Letters must be adjacent to each other, either side by side or diagonally. Each word scores points, with longer words scoring more than shorter ones. In Boggle the grid is four by four, and the minimum word length is three letters. That's the default version of Scramble as well, and the most popular, although you can also play Scramble on larger boards, with longer word lengths or with other restrictions to mix things up. Typically you'll have three minutes to score as many words as you can, although the time limit can be changed when you're setting up your own games.

2. Know that a strong vocabulary is a big asset. Scramble uses the standard Scrabble dictionary, so if you're familiar with that game's quirks, you'll be a step ahead. As you play, you'll accumulate words that you realize are worth points even if you never use them in everyday conversation—words like "ain" and "goa." Proper names like "George" or "Texas" aren't valid, unless they also mean something else, like "Bob." A good way to get up to speed is to scan the list Scramble offers after the clock runs out of all the words it found in the grid. It's a great way to discover new words you've been looking right past because you had no idea they meant anything—words like "ted," a term for spreading out newly cut hay so it will dry faster. See, you're learning already!

3. Find short words quickly by breaking the board down into chunks and scanning them. Just look at a block of four letters. At that scale, your brain should be able to pick out three- and four-letter words almost automatically, without you really having to think about them. If there's no vowel in the block, or once you've found all the words, slide over a space and scan the next block of four. You can cover the entire board quite quickly this way and lay down a kind of "base score" of short words while letting your brain start to absorb the board's patterns.

4. Bite the bullet and start searching for longer words. This takes time while your mind identifies patterns and checks them against all the bits of language you've learned in your lifetime. There's no way around it, but you can maximize the payoff for that time. Once you've found a word, don't let it go before you search inside it for other words. For example, if you find "brother," you've also found "other," "broth," "the" and "her."

5. Look for score multipliers. An "s" on the board is your friend because, once you find a word that ends next to it, you can also score the plural version. "Date" and "dates" are two different words, so you've just doubled your score for that word. (Actually more than doubled it since the plural form is longer.) "S" is the easiest of these to use because it only takes one letter, but also be on the lookout for "er," "ed" and even "ing."

6. Work backward from the end once you find a good word. This will help you find other words. This works because of the way English words were built. Once we found a good vowel consonant pattern, it was easy to invent new words by just changing the initial sound. So, for example, if you've found a word like "fork," it would be great if you could also score "forks," "forked," and "forking." But what are the odds of that? It's much more effective to work backward for new letters you can stick on the beginning and make whole new words like "cork," "pork" or "work."

7. Don't be afraid to type gibberish if you can't see anything and time is ticking by. You don't lose points for entering something that's not a word. Sometimes you'll discover those "Oh, that's a word?" words. And even if you don't, there seems to be something about typing in the patterns you see that helps your brain with the processing. You may well find yourself suddenly realizing that what you just typed isn't a word, but the same letters backwards without the "r" do make a word.